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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31951 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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We've all had a reason to fight. But not everyone is willing to put everything on the line and seek a decision. Too risky. They might lose an internship, or an eye.

And I suspect in a lot of cases whatever the point of dispute is would be worth losing an internship, but not an eye.

It's a matter ultimately of values. If you value money, career, house, a clean criminal record and the good opinion of other people who value those things, physical risk is crazy.

Again, it's not just the physical risk. It's the fact that even if you win you lose; if you lose you go to the hospital if you win you go to jail, if you go to jail and are charged and convicted you lose your future and your life from then on is a series of low-wage jobs to make ends meet until you die. The least-losing move is not to play.

There's a scene in the move Crash where a cop feels up a man's wife during a traffic stop. The man does nothing and sucks up to the cop. I don't recall but he might have lost his wife over it. This is awful, of course, and you probably figure any real man would take a swing at the cop. But if the man does that, he gets beaten, arrested, convicted, and goes to prison for assault on a police officer, and loses his wife anyway. That's the situation a lot of white collar people are in with any fight. The things the all-powerful state can take away are valuable.

I find all that utterly worthless. The good opinion of people incapable of risking anything real is meaningless. Money is paper. Careers are bullshit.

As Homer Simpson's brain once pointed out, "money can be exchanged for goods and services". Careers can be used to get money which can be exchanged for goods and services.

Money is a symbol for work, work is operationalized as time, you are buying things with the only thing you can't get more of.

And yes, we all need to work to make the symbols that let us pay for the necessities of life.

But how much is needed and what is actually necessary can vary widely. With less work, you get more time.

you probably figure any real man would take a swing at the cop.

Because everyone not a coward is stupid. A real man would have options, and he'd probably want to exercise them intelligently.

I wonder, as you lovingly recount a just-so movie scene of abject humiliation, what you really feel when you see yourself in that moment. Injustice? Vengeance?

Gratitude that it's a cop, otherwise you'd be expected to do something?

Something more prurient?

Two can read minds, mon frere.

Because everyone not a coward is stupid. A real man would have options, and he'd probably want to exercise them intelligently.

The situation boiled down to two options -- do something that will leave you destroyed, or suffer extreme humiliation. It was deliberately constructed by the filmmakers that way. In-film it was constructed by the cop that way -- and such sadists exist in real life.

I wonder, as you lovingly recount a just-so movie scene of abject humiliation, what you really feel when you see yourself in that moment. Injustice? Vengeance?

Frustration and anger, naturally. But also recognition. Because there are many situations a modern person under a modern government faces all the time that are similar, though the consequences for yielding are usually lesser. The government causes a problem or refuses to address one, but also provides such negative incentives to anyone solving them themselves that it makes sense to just suffer the problem. Homeless people menace and assault others on NYC subways. Groups of urban youths camp on rental bikes, preventing renters from using them. Farmers have their livestock taken by Federally protected predators -- or the suburban version, Federally protected geese shit all over people's lawns and parks. The commonality is there's a problem and fairly simple direct action one can take to solve it, but the government forbids the direct action. By itself the direct action might be risky, but add the government in and it's no longer risky; loss of some sort is near-certain, and now it works out that suffering the original problem is clearly the right move.

As Hlynka noted with a somewhat different valence, the job of the government isn't to protect regular people from criminals; it's to protect criminals from regular people. And that job they do.

I'm arguing that there's more than one way to skin a cat. Yes, we live in low-grade anarcho-tyranny. But part of that is the ability to circumvent or subvert that system. You just have to be willing to color outside the lines a bit. Lean into the anarchy to contravene the tyranny.

Of course, that risks the benefits of social status granted by the tyrant, which you value and I do not.

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